Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Introduction
Emmanuel Levinas is not a philosopher of love. The Lithuanian-born, French Jewish thinker gave birth to a rather substantial œuvre, writing for nearly seventy years on a variety of themes and questions. If love appears in the prose of Levinas, it is not as a topic in itself…
Author: Samuel Buchoul
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 1
It is undeniable that Levinas tends to submit numbers of formulations, expressions or hypotheses that seem, to say the least, controversial. In Existents and Existence, Levinas states, “the other par excellence is the feminine,” a proposition that would be complemented, one year later in Time and the Other with the view that the pure “essence” of the feminine is otherness or alterity…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 2
The richness of Levinas’s prose allows for numerous possible interpretations. Levinas is an author who is very careful with his words. This is the consideration that has led a number of commentators to try retrieving the sources of Levinas’s more or less controversial statements on the feminine…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Part 3
The margins regularly produce some of the most pertinent voices. Mitchel Verter is a rather unknown and unrecognized scholar, who dissimulates this qualification of his on the background of his résumé, to highlight his professional activity as restaurant waiter and suicide counsellor. He has nonetheless written a series of fascinating essays on Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche and others, all available in his obscure page, hosted on a communitarian website…
Levinas: For the Feminine Other – Conclusion
If the aim of a scholarly work of quality is to present a problem in its diverse complexities, and, in some situations, to take a position or defend one of the views, it could appear, here, as judicious to use Verter’s demonstration as the last words of this discussion…
An Ethics of Love – Epigraph
This is why through the face
filters the obscure light
coming from beyond the face,
from what is not yet,
from a future never future enough,
more remote than the possible.
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.1
Levinas writes about the encounter of the Other as a ‘perturbation’ or ‘interruption’ of our everyday human experience. The Other is not only the shelter, or the incarnated form, of the Infinite. It is, for Levinas, what complexifies our spontaneous understanding of time itself. Time is what gets interrupted by the Other…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.2
French language contains one interesting expression, which we could borrow to further discuss the encounter of the loved Other in and after Levinas: the point de fuite. Levinas does not make a use of this expression. The point de fuite is principally a technical term, belonging to the field of photography and visual art…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.3
While this question could certainly meet no satisfactory answer in the case of visual arts, our intention here is to speculate a few ideas in the analogous case of the loved Other. To permit this, we must first realize that this spatial model applies to two moments of the relation to the loved Other…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.4
But this escape is flexible, moving, almost plastic. Once the visual or perceptive encounter is consumed, once the interaction with a lover-to-be has become a proper relationship of love, the relationship of a couple recognizing itself as exclusive couple, for them and for the rest of their surrounding community, the dynamic changes…